Cross-language information retrieval using Web directories

Since the Web consists of documents in various domains or genres, the method for cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) of Web documents should be independent of a particular domain. In this paper, we propose a CLIR method which employs a Web directory provided in multiple language versions (such as Yahoo!). In the proposed method, feature terms are first extracted from Web documents for each category in the source and the target languages. Then, one or more corresponding categories in another language are determined beforehand by comparing similarities between categories across languages. Using these category pairs, we intend to resolve ambiguities of simple dictionary translation by narrowing the categories to be retrieved in the target language.